The beheading was appointed for fourteen and a-half o'clock, Roman
time:
Or a quarter before nine in the forenoon. I had two friends
with me; and as we did not know but that the crowd might be very
great, we were on the spot by half-past seven. The place of
execution was near the church of San Giovanni decollato (a doubtful
compliment to Saint John the Baptist) in one of the impassable back
streets without any footway, of which a great part of Rome is
composed--a street of rotten houses, which do not seem to belong to
anybody, and do not seem to have ever been inhabited, and certainly
were never built on any plan, or for any particular purpose, and
have no window-sashes, and are a little like deserted breweries,
and might be warehouses but for having nothing in them. Opposite
to one of these, a white house, the scaffold was built. An untidy,
unpainted, uncouth, crazy-looking thing of course: some seven feet
high, perhaps: with a tall, gallows-shaped frame rising above it,
in which was the knife, charged with a ponderous mass of iron, all
ready to descend, and glittering brightly in the morning sun,
whenever it looked out, now and then, from behind a cloud.
There were not many people lingering about; and these were kept at
a considerable distance from the scaffold, by parties of the Pope's
dragoons. Two or three hundred foot-soldiers were under arms,
standing at ease in clusters here and there; and the officers were
walking up and down in twos and threes, chatting together, and
smoking cigars.
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